The Mother & The Whore (1973)

Hello, strangers of the world, thank you for stopping by again. Today I thought we would reflect on the mighty river of a film that is Mummy & The Ho, an interesting work by short-lived genius Jean Eustache, who cast his eye over the great generation of the 1960s and realised that, in Twitter parlance, “it’s so over.” Reaction at the time was generally scandalised, though it won Special Jury prize at Cannes, Cahiers said it was the greatest film of the decade and, in this century, it got picked as the second-greatest French film of all time in a survey of French film-makers and critics, only missing the top spot to you-can-guess-what. It was elegantly characterised as “New Wave twilight” but that seems a bit gentle to me. It sounds romantic and wistful, and that’s not how this one rolls. At all.

As I watched this weird mix of docu-neutrality and torrential stagey speechifying, it took a while for me to grasp what I was seeing. But eventually it occurred to me that this is the anti Last Tango In Paris, a film which had been hailed as its own cinematic revolution only the year before this. “Anti”, not only in its different milieu, different demographic, and utterly different protagonist (the yammering young ex-leftists who fucked it all up and probably, according to Eustache, shouldn’t even have bothered), and not just in the minimalist stillness and monochromatic drabness that seems to rebuke Bertolucci’s flash beauties, but in its basically spiteful pessimism. Last Tango is about trying and failing, Le Maman Ou Les Putin is about completely giving up – life after you’ve realised there’s no way forward and you’re stuck among the ruins of once believing the opposite. 

Eustache may have contempt for this decision but in his version of Paris ‘72, there’s nothing else. In Last Tango, we know Jeanne goes back to the bourgeois life she hates and that unfolding misery is saved for after the celluloid has stopped running. The later film mirrors this - “the whore” Veronika could be a proletarian version of Jeanne trying to live like Paul and hating that charade until she too wants the bourgeois life. But Veronika has never known what she dreams about becoming part of. 

These parallels occur to me. And yet in spirit these two films are so drastically opposed. Maybe it's the contempt that separates the ethos of these directors. Bertolucci thinks the failure of the couple’s doomed desire to be free is inevitable and the hope foolish but to him it's still heartbreaking and his larger target is European culture. Eustache's target is the characters themselves - he thinks the stupidity of the delusional escape-attempt becomes merely awful and demeaning – and he implies that the bourgeois marriage really has been the right way to do things all along. So we watch this crappy little love-triangle, grinding each other down in a demoralising attrition, increasingly empty and soulless - the spiritual cost of not caring, not giving a fuck any more, and the emotional cost of acting like you don’t when you do. 

Imagine coming to this only a few months after the fever-dream of Bertolucci's sensation. No sincere passion, no grand tragedy, no melodramatic disaster: instead, nothing but banal neediness, bitterness, festering emotional wounds they try to block out, and bad choices which eventually lead to a suffocating dead end. It’s a version of Last Tango’s apartment cut off from the world, but a pointless version created out of apathy. Like Brando chases Schneider to her home, Alexandre pursues Veronika to her flat but Eustache’s ending is much more fatal (she lets him stay! Oof! He looks like he’d rather have been shot).

It’s also the anti-Godard. Politics! Rage, critique, satire! Nope - all drained away into pure navel-gazing. No humour, no vitality, not even cool irony, Godard's flamboyant subversions get fucked off here like Bertolucci's eye-candy does. The camera just keeps staring, the edits are unpolished, there's no music unless they're playing old records, the acting is neither naturalistic nor slick, it feels like every possible option of style and narrative is tossed away until Eustache has everything distilled down to the least edifying remainder. Cassavettes comes nearest but even Cassavettes doesn't dare to keep things as blank and small as this.

We all like Bleak, sure, we like it, of course we do, what cinephile doesn't, but the apex of Bleak could be a film that takes the material that French films elevated for a golden decade, which we cherished, and says “there’s nothing there and never was. All that was just movie bullshit. Stop patting yourselves on the back. Nothing means anything and there’s no truth except wallowing in our own petty shit.” 

So it’s long, flat, muted, cold, talky, plotless, grim, anti-climactic and super-disheartening – an incessant impassive no to everything that a film is supposed to do and be, perhaps even beyond Godard's later headstone for the dream, Numero Deux. With conclusions maybe one step more chilling than Godard's – that generation is now a wretched mess without values or value, and that's because it was wrong about everything. I can see why it felt like a Molotov cocktail at the time – fuck, it does now, actually.